The missing middle

Rick McGinnis:

Last month, critic Ted Gioia published an article on his Substack site, The Honest Broker, titled “Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?” He begins by responding to an Atlantic magazine story about the writer John Cheever, once a major figure in American literature until his death in 1982, though as the writer of the Atlantic piece admits, his books are no longer selling.

Gioia, born in 1957, is shocked; Cheever was “a superstar” who contributed to the New Yorker and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature. “But that’s not enough to keep any of his books in the top 25,000 sellers on Amazon,” Gioia writes. “Try suggesting any of Cheever’s prize-winning works to your local reading group, and count the blank stares around the room.”

“And it’s not just Cheever,” he says – the list of great American writers of his cohort slipping into obscurity includes John Updike, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Agee, and many, many others.

“Their era – mid-20th-century America – really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.”

Gioia was echoing something I’d long ago noticed. When I was a student and aspiring to write fiction, Cheever’s short stories were considered the gold standard and I cherished my mass market paperback edition of his collected stories – a book so iconic that it made it into The Preppy Handbook.

For anyone who considered themselves cultured or with dreams of being published – considering the odds, really a dream that would only come true for an almost unmeasurable minority – these were names on a y that stretched from the New York Review of Books to the tables at the front of the bookstores that still thrived from summer towns to big cities.

The included headline-hogging celebrities like Norman Mailer to exotics like Paul Bowles to student reading list mainstays like Harper Lee to acquired tastes like Flannery O’Connor to personal favorites like my own – Walker Percy.

But just like Gioia notes with alarm, I saw these writers and the literary culture they represented – itself an extension of an earlier one with marquee names like Faulker, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Steinbeck – begin to fade as they died or put out one last title to muted fanfare and critical murmurs that their best days were long gone (itself a kind of literary living death).

One answer might be found in another Atlantic article published last year, titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” which begins with a professor at Columbia University complaining that his students are arriving in his classes (for which they or their parents can pay up to US$70,000 a year in tuition and fees) from high schools where they hadn’t been asked to read a book from cover to cover.

A Princeton history professor describes how his students “arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have.” A Chinese literature professor at the University of Virginia “finds his students ‘shutting down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be.”

It’s an article of faith that we’re entering – or are already chest-deep and wading further out to sea in – a “post-literate world.” But anyone who cares will just sigh, roll their eyes, and remind you that we’ve been heading this way for decades.

In his bestselling 1987 polemic The Closing of the American Mind – published with a foreword by Saul Bellow – Allan Bloom described how American universities were failing both students and the intellectual health of the country by abandoning education in favour of academic careerism, pragmatic career training by discarding both history and purpose.

It had been happening for decades but accelerated in the ‘60s, after which “the faculties found themselves face to face with ill-educated young people with no intellectual tastes – unaware that there even are such things, obsessed with getting on with the careers before having looked at life.”

Bloom describes humanities programs as “a day-care center” while faculties of science and the social sciences revel in the popular belief that they are the only serious, practical destination for students with discerning parents and a future. Everything that doesn’t inform the practical study of the hard sciences, economics, political science and the various subsets of anthropology has been offloaded into the humanities – everything from Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and Newton to Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.

“The humanities are the repository for all of the classics now” Bloom writes, “but much of the classic literature claimed to be about the order of the whole of nature and man’s place in it, to legislate for that whole and to tell the truth about it. If such claims are denied, these writers and their books cannot be read seriously, and their neglect everywhere is justified. They have been saved on the condition of them being mummified.”

Bloom’s book came out, to no small controversy, nearly 40 years ago, and I have no reason to believe that Plato, Bacon, and Montesquieu are being read anywhere today in any humanities curricula except in some abstruse graduate school specialty. The challenge is getting undergraduates to read anything that hasn’t been pre-digested in study notes or summed up in AI.

Gioia goes on to talk about how it’s not just books but music and movies from mid-century America that are being quietly forgotten now, despite the country being “at the peak of its global power and influence. Its cultural institutions were well funded and widely admired. America was blessed with an extraordinary generation of talented artists, both emigres and homegrown.”

He lists several operas from this period – Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina – that have disappeared from the repertoires of opera companies though, to be frank, the survival of opera companies, not to mention symphony orchestras and ballet companies – is a miracle on its own.

Gioia notes how jazz that pre-dates Miles Davis and John Coltrane is now obscure, though he partially answers this question by noting that “music recorded after the emergence of high fidelity sound in the late 1950s” has drifted into the collections of die-hard fans and off jazz radio and streaming playlists.

He complains how Netflix can’t show him Citizen Kane when he requests it but suggests that he might be interested in The Founder, a 2016 film about the birth of McDonalds, or the business soap opera Suits. He provides a graph that shows how since 2015 the streaming service has made 80 per cent of its catalogue movies produced after 2015.

“The sad reality is that the entire work of great filmmakers and movie stars has disappeared from the dominant platform,” Gioia writes. “It wouldn’t cost Netflix much to offer a representative sample of historic films from the past, but they can’t be bothered.”

He blames the internet and its culture of the eternal now, which regards anything outside of the narrowest contemporary aesthetic and relevance as a burden. “And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control,” says Gioia. “When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it canceled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.”

There’s an argument that the culture that produced and celebrated John Cheever has gone the way of The Preppy Handbook. But Gioia might be even more horrified if he were aware of the massive current popularity, among female readers on BookTok, of a novel called Morning Glory Milking Farm and a whole genre of “paranormal romance” books. (I won’t say anything else about it except that I take no responsibility for what you’ll discover if you Google the book.) The problem might not be that people aren’t reading but what they’re willing to read.

Or it might simply be one more bitter front in the endless generational culture wars. If you’re heavily invested in the uniqueness of your peers and their time, and in the notion of perfectible societies, it might be disturbing to learn not just that previous generations suffered from the same anxieties that afflict you but that they were more elegant in describing them, in words or pictures. If I got anything from books by Cheevers, Bellow, Ellison, O’Connor, Bowles or Percy it was that there are rarely solutions, only responses, and that the pace of technology is a great distraction from a stagnating culture.

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